Tuesday, December 29, 2015

"Palestinians using knives, guns and vehicles have killed 19 Israelis, an American student and a Palestinian resident of the West Bank over the past three months. More than 130 Palestinians have been killed during the same period, about two-thirds of them in carrying out, or attempting to carry out, attacks. Others were killed during violent clashes with Israeli forces in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and demonstrations along the Gaza border." Notice that Palestinians kill Israelis, so we know who killed Israelis. In the case of the Palestinian killed (and note that NYT always lists Israeli victims before Palestinian victims although almost ten times more Palestinians have been killed in this period than Israelis). And notice that passive voice in "Palestinians have been killed", as we don't know who killed them. And then notice how justifications are given: that they were killed either as they were carrying out or "attempting to carry out". How do we know they were attempting to carry out if they did not carry out? Because Israel says so of course. The remaining are listed to have been killed "during violent clashes". So basically with that slight of language, the New York Times manages to make 130 Palestinians killed guilty of crimes, while it manages to make 19 Israeli killed to be innocent victims of Palestinian "murderers". Welcome to the world of US journalism about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Oh, and notice how it links Palestinians who were killed "in violent clashes" with Palestinians killed in "demonstrations", thereby implying that demonstrating is a crime that should be punished by death.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

The Paris meeting of
national officials united to save capitalism by re-branding climate change was challenged
by outside demonstrators from all over the world calling for system change. The
people were way ahead of their governments. Whether called revolutionary
by supporters or disastrous by opponents, what should rightly be called COP-OUT
21 came to a final agreement that means business as usual. Private profits
continue to come before any consideration of public loss and that is the root
of the problem for humanity.

By slightly slowing the
pace of earth drowning under carbonation through “advising” less carbon
creation offered as much a solution to our problem as continued pouring of raw sewage
into our drinking water offers planetary health as long as we slow the rate at
which diseased slop oozes into our reservoirs.

While the world’s foremost
polluters figure out how to continue sucking fossil fuel out of the earth and
only change its market pricing structure as an effort to slow down its
use, outside demands for leaving that fuel underground and switching to
alternative energy sources grow in passion, logic and necessity. Switching from
fuel burning energy to wind, geothermal and solar power spells calamity for
financial empires built on coal, oil and war, but mean salvation for our race.
The ruling powers of finance capital wont stand for that but we can’t tolerate
anything less, no matter what mental and physical havoc their media and
military minions help them carry out. We cannot go on this way, and it isn’t
only the recently arrived problem of climate change – it’s actually been around
and criticized for generations – but all the negative things this anti-democratic
economy does, which have also been criticized for generations.

The future of humanity
calls for an end to the system of private profit and public loss that has
brought wonderful lives to many – as did feudalism and slavery – but misery and
deprivation to even more, with the number of humans carrying the loss rising
dangerously as profits grow for an ever smaller population.

In less than a generation
we have gone from worshipping a millionaire minority and relying on their
philanthropy, rather than taxing them, to help majorities with much less, to
groveling before a much smaller billionaire minority and relying on their
philanthropy to help even greater majorities with much less, rather than taxing
them. This staggering progress in our democracy is very much like the
tremendous gains we have made in falsely identifying people by race and moving
from calling some fellow humans “colored people” back in the dumb 20th
century to calling them “people of color” in the brilliant 21st. And
interestingly, far more “people of color” are locked up in our penal colonies
and have been shot dead by our police than was the case when they were lowly
“colored people”. Progress for some who jumped into a few openings in the upper
middle class was accompanied by far more sinking into worse poverty and social
exclusion than was the sordid case before. Affirmative action indeed, but for
how many? And at what cost?

That is how this system works at all times. Some profit while
others lose. Always. We’re told it’s nature but we were once ignorant enough to
think slavery was also natural. We at least seemed to learn that wasn’t the
case. Now, we have to learn to understand all the contradictions of running
society according to these warped rules of minority domination or we will lose
society itself, for everyone.

The exact same economic
process has been at work for “people of no color”, though even without skin
tone bigotry it is almost bizarre to attribute privilege, as in “white
privilege” to all who share one or another complexion with little notice to the
size of their bank accounts and their social stratification. Economics rule the
nation and economic privilege is enjoyed by a minority, with bigotry and
injustice dealt out with meaner outcomes to various groups but with full
equality of divide and conquer rule that assures minorities acting for
minorities means the smallest minority – the rich – maintains power and control
of everything that matters. Especially humans reduced to powerless pawns, only
able to operate for some members of one or another identity group, but never
able to work together as a functioning democracy in deed and not merely word.

This system has created
abundant comfort for many and incredible amounts of lethal garbage for most, inconceivably
increasing financial fortunes for a dwindling-in-number class of royal rich and
a fast expanding number of poor with re-branded as middle class workers sinking
into categories of working poor, unemployed and homeless.

This has been going on
since long before science “discovered” climate change, enlightened capital
figured out how to use it to make money, and the reactionary pinheads,
boneheads and brain-dead used their opposition to organize the innocent. But
150 years ago Karl Marx did an extensive analysis of this system. He spoke of
all its positives and mostly negatives, calling attention to what capitalism
was doing and would do to people and the earth if it wasn’t stopped. Think
about chemicals in our food “products”, imported cheap labor, exported jobs, unions
reduced to a tiny segment of the population, increasing poverty and all the
present talk of threatening environmental factors, and consider this:

“Capitalist production…disturbs the metabolic interaction
between man and the earth, i.e. prevents the return to the soil of its
constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it
therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil….
The social combination and organization of the labor processes is turned into
an organized mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom
and independence.… Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a
progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil;
all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a
progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The
more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry,
like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of
destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology…only by
sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”

That’s a very brief quote from a three-volume work. Much too
long for a tweet but hopefully understandable to anyone but a twit. Capitalism
is an old, outmoded, abusive system that needs to be changed for the salvation
of humanity. Marx could see that fact a long, long time ago. We’d better learn
and act on it, now, before it’s too late.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

"We will not have our organization's image sullied by this vicious man and his hate speech. We do not discriminate among the children we have sex with and will not let this evil Hitler type monster influence our members or cast a dark light on all the good we do" said NCMFBA* president T.B. Falworth Jackson.

"Our members love and sexually relate to christian, jewish, muslim, agnostic, atheist, buddhist and any and all children of all faiths, races and belief systems. This is the American way!"

Spokespeople for the Democratic, Republican, Communist and American Nazi parties all joined in praise for the group's courageous outcry against rhetorical bigotry. In a joint statement of solidarity, they said:

At a time when all Americans need to come together against rhetorical bigotry against muslims while we continue murdering them by the thousands in their homelands with weapons and not words, the NCMFBA is a beacon of light shining on the ideals that make us the master race of self chosen people the world desperately needs, now more than ever.

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

He's "unhinged, offensive, reprehensible," and "ridiculous." His proposals are "unconstitutional." He's a "racist, xenophobic, religious bigot" who doesn't understand "our laws" or "our history." He must be rejected by all "real" Americans.

Wow. What accounts for such an emotional outburst from U.S. politicians and media commentators? Mostly it's that Trump is not simply repeating focus-group tested sound-bites and bumper-sticker slogans pre-approved by slick media managers, but is saying what he actually thinks about the U.S. being subject to continual terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists. The proposals themselves leave much to be desired (he says nothing about U.S. foreign policy crimes continually carried out against Muslim populations abroad), but he is at least paying us the compliment of honestly commenting on a serious problem, and not merely articulating a consensus of wealthy funders of his campaign. So far, he is the only Republican candidate to do this, which the talking heads in the corporate media find incomprehensible, so accustomed are they to the parroting of official cliches.

The pinhead pundits and bought candidates are particularly upset at Trump's calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country, and the surveillance of Muslim mosques inside the U.S., proposals that offend the tender consciences of those who have accepted torture, preventive detention, mass killing of civilians (dismissed as "collateral damage") and nearly universal surveillance of communications, among other Bush-Obama policies manifestly inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution and "the rule of law" they claim to revere and uphold. Nonetheless, there is a certain unfairness in singling out Muslims for attention, given what is going on in synagogues and churches around the U.S. Do we really need to remind anyone that synagogues raise huge sums of tax exempt funds for Israel to degrade, rob, torture and murder Palestinian civilians on a daily basis, which has long been a major Muslim (and Christian) grievance against the U.S.? Apparently, we do. Have we forgotten that Christian evangelicals cheer these racist murderers on, convinced that such policies are the prelude to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and God's eternal paradise? Apparently, we have. And does anyone really know the full extent of Catholic sexual terrorism against children, long defended by the church as a private matter, best remedied by "healing" and prayer? Probably not.

So would the hysterical anti-Trump mob be any less upset if Trump proposed a general crackdown on organized crime in religious institutions? Of course not. The problem is not Trump per se, but the fact that he has the nerve and the money to say what he thinks without fearing the consequences. This is intolerable to establishment politics, which depends on an elite consensus imposed on the country by massive propaganda backed by force. Now that consensus has lost the confidence of the Republican base, which to its credit wants real change, not more of the phony "change you can believe in."

As the chorus of denunciation rises, Trump appears to grow ever stronger, while the GOP candidates condemning him fade into obscurity. A parade of political "experts" is then trotted out to proclaim his base marginal, though the plain fact is that many in the Cruz and Carson camps do not find him loathesome (Cruz conspicuously declines to condemn him) which means that his popularity still has plenty of room to grow should either or both of those candidates exit the race. In any event, he continues to hold double-digit leads both nationally and in Iowa, which must mean that everyone hates him except the voters.

For months now we have been told that Trump's public support will evaporate once subjected to "rational" scrutiny (by increasingly hysterical experts) or "likely voters" contemplating actual ballots they will cast in the no-longer-distant primary elections. But the opposite has occurred, and today Trump is the solidly entrenched front runner nationally and in Iowa. His approach may indeed be the "politics of fear," but then, after decades of Washington treating Muslim-dominant regions of the world like free-fire zones, there is plenty to be fearful about. How long will it be, for example, before an ISIS inspired terrorist group figures out how to construct and detonate an atomic bomb in a U.S. city? (Plenty of fissionable material is unaccounted for around the world, and construction of an atomic bomb is not technically difficult).

The problem is not Trump's appeals to fear, but rather that he aspires to be "tough on terror" without recognizing (let alone doing anything about) the wholesale terrorism the U.S. has long practiced throughout the world, especially in the Middle East, from where our insurgent terrorist threat in "the homeland" originates. This cannot work, of course, any more than peace in Northern Ireland could have been achieved without addressing British colonialism. Throughout the Muslim world serious grievances against the U.S. exist, and must be addressed, but neither Trump nor the chorus of fools ignorantly denouncing him recognize this.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

After the latest tragedy in Paris, the outpouring of
heartfelt sympathy from ordinary human beings and cynical posturing from
political leadership, it is time for people to stop, think and take democratic
action before it gets much worse. And in the short run it will get worse.

The Islamic State is a reaction to what the west has been
doing to the arab-Muslim world for longer than any of us have been around, even
longer than “decades” in time-meaningless media speech.

After the First World War destroyed the Ottoman Empire and
Europe began creating national boundaries in the arab-Muslim world having more
to do with western real estate economics than native populations wishes, the
seeds were planted for the present destruction of those Middle Eastern nations
and the reaction to it by Islamic fundamentalism. But western intrusion began
long before then, which is why some Islamic Jihadist writings of the present
refer to their enemies as “crusader-Zionists”, linking political economic
cultures of supposedly different eras and religious beliefs but really as
different as the two sides of a coin to the people they have dominated for far
too long.

To hear the master race of self-chosen people who have ruled
the world from the time of past crusades to present Israel, theirs was and is a
project to civilize and democratize those with no idea how to conduct
themselves as an advanced population of organized freedom loving people. Of
course it may have to murder hundreds of thousands, even millions, in the
process of civilizing these unfortunates, especially if they not only fail to
obey their dominators but even insist on making rules for themselves, but mass
murders and the destruction of secular governments are simply part of the
process of building democracy and respect for life. Got that?

It should be common knowledge by now that the origins of Islamic
fundamentalist warrior groups had to do with financing and training by the USA,
its Arab fascist allies and its NATO lap dogs. The jihadists were originally
employed to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, after they had come to
the aid of a secular regime the west worked to destroy because it was seen as
too friendly to the Russians, who were their next-door neighbors. If you
believe you are a master race of self-chosen people, brainpower takes a back
seat to killing power. When that bloody war ended with the soviets out and the fundamentalists
in power, the westerners watched in blissful ignorance as a former secularly
ruled nation became overtly religiously orthodox and where, among other radical
changes, women once of the professional educated class were returned to
servitude and obedience to men, covering themselves in public in dress codes
that could seem puritanical to westerners but were at least partly enforced to
keep them from looking like cheap tramps, which was how islamic fundamentalists
saw many western women.

What bungling supremacist policy makers also failed to
notice was that the jihadists didn’t just hate communists; they hated the
entire materialist west, wanted to rid themselves of all its social
contamination, and go their own way. Oops.

After 911, the terror attack that provoked the mindless
assault on the people and nations of the Middle East that continues today, the
first stage of the bigger bloodbath started in Afghanistan. Easily blamed,
after the fact, on a president treated as a dunce by cowards – only Barbara
Lee, of more than 500 “democratically elected representatives” in congress
spoke against the action - it has continued to Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and of
course has seen retaliation in the USA, Europe and other points west.

The Islamic State, treated by western consciousness control as
a bunch of bloody killers bent on replacing the commercial televised mayhem of
wrestling, kick boxing and Fox News with actual beheadings, is, whether
slandered and cheapened by being called self proclaimed or so-called, a state
of Islamic people with territory, currency and trade policies, which wishes to
have no connection to or relationship with the forces which have colonized,
tormented and brutalized its people for so long. That their tactics are brutal
and dedicated to frightening the west and creating chaotic tendencies is clear,
and that they are and have been successful is equally clear. What is to be
done?

Obviously, not having well meaning if silly debates over
whether or not to take in helpless refugees who are fleeing bloodshed we play a
major role in creating and sustaining. The biggest help we can extend Syrians
escaping war is to stop making the war. The same is true for all the other
nations and people we have dominated in the area and in whose affairs we have
meddled by supporting oppressive dictatorial regimes which do our bidding and
thus become acceptable butchers. We are presently informed – repeatedly, and by
sources from the extreme right to what passes for a left in the USA – that the
"horrendous Assad" is brutal and must be replaced and that is why we have helped
if not created various groups in Syria to take up armed struggle against his
government. Of course they now amount to nothing and foreign jihadists, from
all over the arab world as well as europe, are the fighters threatening the
Syrian regime, as once again the formidably armed but mentally crippled
leadership of western nations sounds a collective “huh?” while it continues to
destroy people and nations because, um, that’s what it does.

Thanks to the Russians awakening to potential disaster in
their neighborhood and taking both military and diplomatic action to bring
about peace talks to attempt solving the future leadership problem in Syria,
there are signs of hope. Even Obama, who only looks peaceful by comparison to
Killer Clinton and the idiot republicans, seems to see that America will lose,
badly, if the warfare continues. But that is not nearly close enough to what
really must be done.

The USA must get out of the empire business, end its warfare
economic entrapment and stop slaughtering people to allow the minority
corporate rich and their cowardly minority politicians to use other people’s
lives and money to feel like macho women and men who rule the world. If we
don’t take democratic action to stop them, we will pay a heavier price in
future than we have paid in the past. And it won’t just be financial.

We need to get out of all the places in the middle east –
and the rest of the world - where the people don’t want us, stop performing as
Israel’s servant and insist they stop butchering Palestine by cutting off all financial
and especially military aid until they do so, and only attempt to help others
when they have truly democratic rule – so far evading us! – and ask for our
help, and then only after we have seen to it that all our people have homes,
health care and jobs. In our very near future, we’ll either have real democracy
or unbelievable barbarism. What’s your choice?

Exactly what some of the attackers said they were avenging in the murderous

events of the previous night.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Last night's horrifying bloodbath in Paris reminds us yet again of the urgency of a change in Western policy in the Middle East. Until and unless that happens - and it can't happen unless an aroused and informed public makes it happen - more massacres are inevitable.

ISIS has taken responsibility - proudly - for the attacks that killed well over a hundred people out for Friday night fun, and promised more and worse to come. Before we get swept up in jingoist hysteria, let us recall that ISIS is not self-begotten, but emerged from the murderous chaos that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Recall as well that the U.N.'s Humanitarian Coordinator Denis Halliday accused the U.S. of genocide in Iraq five years BEFORE that invasion as a result of the crippling sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War. In other words, the West's systematic destruction of Iraq for an entire generation has given birth to a terrorist movement dedicated to killing as many Westerners as possible. Hideous? Yes. Surprising? No.

Not a single leader on the American scene has offered an intelligent policy response. Self-righteous posturing and threats of retaliation are the order of the day. France is planning bombing raids in Syria, which at least one of the terrorists involved in the Friday night massacres said was the motivation for the Paris attacks in the first place.

Mourning the dead doesn't mean much if we immediately reinforce the policies that led to their deaths. Have we not had enough of slaughter? Why do we not see on TV the effects of the West's constant military interventions in the Middle East? If we regularly saw the tortured, maimed and killed on our TV screens, we would be in a better position to judge events like the hideous attacks in Paris on Friday night. These were clearly revenge attacks, as they have no military significance whatsoever. Why treat them as unprovoked attacks?

And let's stop with the idiotic questions like, "Can a similar attack happen in the U.S.?" Of course it can. Anybody remember 911? The grievances that provoked that appalling attack are still in play, as nothing was done about them. (See post for May 1, 2011 "Osama Bin Laden: The Real Story" for a review.)

ISIS would not exist were it not for the West's (especially the U.S.'s - the European powers follow Washington's lead) constant interventions in the Middle East. So why are we there? To make sure Israel can continue to colonize Arab land? What legitimate U.S. interest is there in perpetuating that? To topple Bashar al Assad in Syria? He is the legitimate leader of Syria; what U.S. interest is there in overthrowing him, which would make ISIS even more powerful? To "defend" against Iran and Putin? Iran is more influential than ever thanks to our destruction of the Iraqi state, and Putin is an avowed and active enemy of ISIS. What U.S. interest is there in opposing either of them?

Until U.S. leaders stop bad-mouthing Assad, Putin, and the mullahs in Iran, we will know that they are not serious about reducing the threat of terrorist violence. For it is the overweening arrogance of foreigners attempting to govern peoples over whom they have no legitimate authority that has bred the violence these leaders pretend to abhor in the first place.

British activist and author Tariq Ali has offered the following sensible advice on how to end the terrorist nightmare emanating from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan: "There are three important pre-requisites to re-stabilizing the region: end of Western support to the extended Saudi royal family (the source of extremist Islamic sects); end of all Western intervention in the region; a single Israeli/Palestinian state with equal rights for all its citizens."

This agenda has no traction in Washington. Serious advocates of peace need to learn how to give it some.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

The annual experience of pontificating politicians and their
media stenographers extolling the virtues of the brave, heroic, selfless and
dedicated heroes these draft dodgers and service avoiders laud for doing what they
would never dream of doing is becoming ever more sickening. Especially as so
many veterans are reduced to poverty, unemployment, living in their cars or on
the street or wasting away in VA hospitals where budget cuts administered by
free market fanatics of the right, center and what passes for a liberal left
strengthen market forces at the expense of these quickly forgotten “patriots”
who make life safe for minority private profiteers while propagandized into
thinking they perform for a fictional majority: The People. Sure.

When was the
last time a truly representative voice of a majority of that group actually
chose to busy itself with bombing, burning, shooting and stabbing people
thousands of miles away based on a real, materially experienced threat that
they faced and took action to deal with? Of course you all remember it was the day
after Santa Claus brought the Easter bunny to dinner after the Tooth Fairy
performed their first holy communion bar mitzvah.

And in truth, the overwhelming majority of service people in
all branches of the military in all the wars they are falsely lauded for
performing as front line killers for those who make the wars and lie them into
fighting them, are no more or less than workers earning their daily bread. Some
truly join innocently believing they are serving their country and warding off
vicious enemies bent on savaging us in our beds, but far more do so because
they need jobs, can find no other and see a possible chance for learning a
trade or even getting into higher education when they leave the service. A
small minority actually engage an enemy while a majority perform the daily
tasks of maintaining a multi billion dollar mechanized monstrosity that needs
drivers, clerks, craftspeople, cooks, repair workers and hosts of others to
serve as foundation for the structure of a vast murder machine. And in many
cases, they are even safer in doing so than the average american worker at a
bank, school, shopping mall, junk food counter or factory-what few remain in the
USA - since they do not have to face the highway wars that millions of
Americans are involved in every day in seeking wages for survival.

We kill more
than 500 people every week in the traffic horror that we call a private
transportation system and if - and
when ? - that many military people were killed we’d have as massive an anti-war
movement such as this nation has ever seen. We can only hope it doesn’t take
that to bring us to our senses and avoid the whole degenerate celebration by
ending war and thereby never sending people to kill others and risk their own
murders in doing so, all at alleged protection of the very market forces that
put them in such danger in the first place.

We need a democratic force to put a stop to all manner of
hypocritical posturing by political pimps for profit seeking that is at the
root of the most dreadful threat facing humanity. What some call climate change
and opponents label as climate denial is really capitalism denial as the major
problem that must be solved in order to assure a future for the human race. A
stop to war making and its satanic religious beatification through hypocrisy
like this annual feast of ghouls who profit in billions from mass murder would
be an important step in the direction of such a peaceful future.

"I will say the politics of it (illegal immigration) will be (sic) very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande. Or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press. Then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation. And, I will say for those of us who believe people 'ought to come to this country legally, and we should enforce the law,' we're tired of being told it's anti-immigrant. It's offensive."

With all the current attention given to people who are born
one sex but feel, think, act and wish to be known as another, an even smaller
group of people have been forgotten. If they were ever known of in the first place.

The subject of Trans-Species people was brought to the
attention of Middle America when a man who identifies as a raccoon and belongs
to a group trying to get recognition from society complained about being denied
the food service he needs at mid-western
chic-a-taco-pizza-burger-chip-crab-fries facilities.

“I need to burrow for grubs as often as I eat regular food
and these places provide no opportunity for people like me to follow my natural
bodily instincts to answer my tran species needs” said a man who refused to
give his name but claimed he and others in his group choose to be addressed as
“coons”. When advised that could be called hate speech since it was once used
as a derogatory term for people with more color than people with no color, he said
“Things change and america and the world needs to be open to realize that there
are many among us, not just us coons but folks like trans male donkeys who call
themselves "assholes", trans female cats who like to be called "pussies" and trans
female dogs who answer to "bitches" and many others among our community who have
needs and desires and the right to be acknowledged and addressed by the names
we choose.”

The anonymous man said he always knew he was different as a
child, at first thinking he was a dog until his family bought a cat but even
then he was not sure. “When I saw a raccoon in our garden and looked into its
eyes I felt a bond and an understanding that has taken me on a path to find my
true self in spending time in trees, raiding garbage cans and especially
burrowing into the earth in search of delicious grubs. This is who I am and
what I am and no psychiatrist, neurosurgeon, bank teller or UPS driver can
change that.”

Officials at the anonymous town in the anonymous state were
trying to measure popular consciousness, social morality, public need and
market forces in coming to a decision in how to deal with these transpecies
people either by catering to their needs or, as in the case of most powerless
minorities without dollars , celebrity clout or emotionally appealing personal dramas, just telling them to drop fucking
dead.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

LONDON — Standard Chartered, an Asia-focused bank based in
London, said on Tuesday that it planned to raise up to $5.1 billion in new
capital and cut 15,000 jobs as part of a widespread reshaping of the lender
under its new chief executive.

Monday, November 2, 2015

That's the problem, the
acceptance of such degeneracy as representing something called civilization.
How about rules of rape? Rules of child molesting? Or worst of all for
some people, rules of animal cruelty?

Only commit rape between the
hours of nine and five, wear white gloves, do not punch the face of the victim
but only the body, and only if absolutely necessary. Sound good?

Only molest a child age
twelve or above and then only if the child is dressed provocatively but refuses
to comply with adult orders to dress appropriately. Sound okay?

Only beat a dog or cat to
death if the animal vomits on your rug, craps on your linoleum or bites or scratches
a guest. Okay?

If not, why and how can we
go on accepting the filthy, stupid, depraved idea that it's perfectly
alright to blow people's brains out, to rip their bodies limb from limb, to
burn them to death, to shoot, stab, beat and otherwise end their lives
anonymously and abruptly, if we're involved in a war - unless! - they are in a
hospital or church-synagogue-mosque or other place of worship. Sensible,
thoughtful and humane, if you dine on gourmet feces and are degenerate enough
to observe the rules of rape, molestation and worse.

If the people murdered at
the hospital had been blown to bits at some other location, they would have
suffered death known only to their next of kin, loved ones and friends, like
the hundreds of thousands we have murdered in the most recent mass destruction
in the middle east. Let's not overload our brains with too much history and
deal in hundreds of millions for all wars, since we are innumerate enough as it
is and having a difficult enough time even considering the madness of these
"rules" spoken of by the good doctor. I mean, hey, let's not go too
far with this mass murder thing; we've got to have some control over why, how
and most especially where we commit these murders. Right? Thoughtful, formally educated, rules for war making humanitarians?

Be nice and only blow up
buildings other than hospitals, like buildings where people are having dinner
before their bloody remains become part of the soup, or where people are having
a wedding celebration without having studied the "rules of war" that
don't stop sanctioned-by-governmental-degeneracy warriors from
dismembering them. And eventually military targets like hospitals,
churches, mosques and synagogues where people and other warlike enemies try to
hide, not understanding that the "rules of war" would then make them
legitimate targets?

It isn't only the
doctor who needs to confront this perversion of soul, spirit and matter that we
all sanction, rationalize and perform as war. It is mass murder and if it is
okay to have millions slaughtered while we go to work, school, shopping or walk
our dogs, then there should be no empty sanctimonious garbage about individuals
having guns representing a special sickness suffered only by them. Gun control? We need massive consciousness change to end the bloody foreign policy that is an extension of our domestic madness.

We are
avoiding many serious problems every day, problems that affect all of humanity,
but the worst of all is avoidance of this subject and the continued
rationalization of it as something somehow natural, necessary to all of us, and
with special "rules". Climate change, capitalism, drought, famine, disease and more
will not be a problem if and when our legal “rules of war” come home to destroy
us, whether said rules of degeneracy are observed or broken by the warriors
from within or without our constitutional house of perversion.

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Nazi-hunting couple to combat genocide for UNESCO

Serge Klarsfeld, 80, a French
historian, lawyer and Holocaust survivor, and his 76-year-old
German-born wife Beate Klarsfeld, along with Director-General of UNESCO,
Irina Bokova posing after being named UN special envoys and honorary
ambassadors on genocide prevention at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Oct.
26, 2015. Photo by Francois Mori/AP Images via JTA

A French Nazi-hunting couple will work as genocide-prevention ambassadors for the United Nations’ education agency.
Serge and Beate Klarsfeld were recognized on Monday by the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for their work
to call “societies to recognize their historical and moral
responsibilities.”
They will contribute to UNESCO’s efforts to curb genocide in places
such as the Middle East and Africa, the Associated Press reported
Wednesday.
“You have done more than hand out justice, you gave a name, a face and a
unique story to those whom some aimed to wipe from the surface of the
earth,” said Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s director general.
Serge Klarsfeld, 80, a French Holocaust survivor and historian, and
German-born Beate, 76, created a database from documents from around the
world that has helped convict multiple Nazi war criminals. They also
founded the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France
association, for descendants of Jews displaced or deported during the
German occupation of France.
The Klarsfelds tracked down infamous Nazi Klaus Barbie, known as the
“Butcher of Lyon” for torturing prisoners while stationed in Lyon, in
Bolivia and spearheaded his extradition to France in 1983.

When asked if they would focus on the situation in Israel regarding the Palestinians they accused the questioner of genocidal antisemitic hate criminality and urged the death penalty for she and her entire family.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

In an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN this morning, Donald Trump explicitly condemned the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2011 overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in Libya, stating that both policies had been catastrophic and left the Middle East dramatically worse off than it had been before. Tapper idiotically inquired, "What about the human rights violations (of Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein)?", to which Trump responded with appropriately withering contempt, "You think they aren't happening NOW?"

There you have it, folks. Trump the political baboon can see at least some patently obvious political realities, whereas pundits almost never can. As foreign policy critic William Blum has pointed out, if you go into the hospital for a knee operation and wake up to discover that your surgeon has removed your entire leg, it is not appropriate to crow that the result has left you "better off," since you no longer have a bad knee. But this is precisely the logic preached to us by the establishment media, that the destruction of Iraq and Libya have made the world "better off," because Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi are no longer around to commit "evil" deeds. And Trump says, correctly, that in the wake of these insane interventions, "there is no Iraq, there is no Libya." There is simply chaos and terror, the predictable result of overthrowing stable governments in favor of terrorist gangs and foreign rule.

Trump has also completely bested Jeb Bush, who, incredibly enough, has put himself in the news to defend the horrendous legacy of his brother George W. Bush. Trump pointed out that it is nonsensical to say, as Jeb continually does, that GW "kept us safe," when three thousand people were killed on his watch. This has nothing to do with "blaming Bush for 911," and everything to do with recognizing what the word "safe" means. Being safe is manifestly inconsistent with being slaughtered in a huge terrorist attack in your "homeland." Given the pathetic nature of Trump's competition, it's surprising he isn't ahead by more than he is. Jeb was nearly reduced to tears when Trump criticized him for speaking Spanish, which he somehow construed as an attack on his (Mexican) wife. And now he takes it as a personal affront that Trump is asking questions about why we were obviously not safe on 911. Jeb is convinced that Trump is dangerously incapable of handling U.S. foreign policy, and he may be right. But at the same time Jeb thinks that the nearly catatonic GW was not only capable, but handled his duties well. Sure.

Meanwhile, Hillary basks in media deference for having "won" the Democratic debate. What debating points did she score that entitle her to this victory lap? In response to Bernie Sanders' observation that social democratic policies should be adopted so as to distribute the wealth less unequally, Hillary said simply, "We are not Denmark." Wow. Who knew? And when the issue of her vote in favor of the Iraq war came up, she said that president Obama still valued her opinion on world affairs after that vote (he made her his Secretary of State), so who is anyone else to criticize? So her falling for Bush and Cheney's b.s. about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is evidence of good judgment (Not that Hussein's possession of such weapons would have justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq; it certainly would not have)? And the subsequent destruction of Iraq was therefore acceptable? Huh?

Thursday, October 22, 2015

In the October 13 Democratic Party debate wrap-up, CNN commentators did a fact check of candidate claims, one of which was Bernie Sanders' assertion that the unemployment rate among white teenagers was 33%, among Latino teenagers was 36%, and among black teenagers was 51%. It was implied that Sanders was either deluded or lying since these figures allegedly refer to the UNDEREMPLOYMENT RATE, not the unemployment rate.

Just how serious a distortion is this, if in fact it is one? Well, not much of one at all, really, because Sanders' wider point, that in the allegedly greatest economy in world history millions of young people have lousy prospects of being properly employed, remains valid. Psychologists report that Millenials are the most stressed-out generation ever, expected to fulfill a success ethic incongruously juxtaposed to increasingly ephemeral "jobs" that offer little in terms of pay, benefits, or prestige. Forty-five percent of the unemployed are young people, and the average Millenial only lasts 2.6 years at a company these days. Some thirty percent of the workforce is contingent labor, that is, disposable workers without security. By some estimates 40 to 50% of income producing jobs will be short-term contract work by 2020. Career lifespans are now reaching 50 and more years, so half of Millenials can expect to freelance for their entire working lives.

Nit-picking about whether the proper term for this social catastrophe is "unemployment" or "underemployment" is a media "gotcha" game of little interest to the general public, and is one crucial reason why Americans - right, left, and center - despise the establishment media. The pundits can't see the forest for the trees, and engage in selective attacks rather than across-the-board rational analysis. No fact check was done on Hillary Clinton's schoolgirl-like gush that there was a "mass genocide" happening in Libya in 2011, a rather serious omission given that the country with the highest standard of living in Africa was plunged into bloody chaos, its popular government replaced by al Qaeda in de facto alliance with the United States.

This is also why we should take with a very large grain of salt the idea that media scrutiny of Donald Trump's statements must inevitably lead to a decline in his popularity. A media campaign to bring him down (in league with the GOP establishment) stands a good chance of backfiring, since the American public is sick of pundits and politicians both, and may very well continue to prefer Trump over the quadrennial trash hyped by the corporate media as "presidential" material. Seeing him under attack by forces the public strongly dislikes may make him more popular than ever. A better approach for the media to take would be to investigate Trump's popularity, which appears to be largely based on his stance vis-a-vis immigration.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Once again, an explosion of violence in
Israel, which always means far more Palestinians than Israelis winding up dead,
while U.S. politicians and media act as though tragedy only strikes the
Israelis. The entire Middle East is being torn apart by warfare and all of it
is related, directly or not, to the colonial establishment of the Jewish
European state in the middle of a predominantly Arab and Muslim area. Most of
the world knows this but in the USA it is treated as top secret, not
acknowledged at all or claimed a giant lie dedicated to destroying an entire
people.

Whether one believes Jews are Semites
from the Middle East and god’s original nuclear family from thousands of years
ago, or that they are Europeans who converted to Judaism more recently and
moved to New York, Germany, Miami Beach and Los Angeles to open delis, banks,
galleries and become comics, or are a particularly cursed people in constant
danger of being exterminated, annihilated, wiped out by hateful jealous others,
or simply ethnically identifiable like everyone else by cultural habits of
speech, food, dress and manners, or members of a secularly devout or devoutly
secular religion given to narratives of factually based fiction or fictionally
based fact, there are two extremist groups that present real problems
concerning real and imagined anti-jewish bigotry.

The first is composed of nutcases who think four Jews are sitting in a room in
Tel Aviv - or New York - planning, plotting, conspiring and organizing anything
and everything that happens on earth and in the rest of the universe. New
planets discovered, World Series participants, global trade deals, famine, crop
circles, droughts, disease, the Super Bowl winner, 911, war anywhere on earth,
all these are seen as manifestations of the power of "the jews”. These
nuts are a problem and unfortunately play into the“see, they all hate us” narrative, but in the present tense they
are a relatively minor menace.

The second
group is composed of jews, their fans and those in their employ, who truly
believe there is a category of human different from all other humans, but at
the same time, the same as all other humans, and also at the same time,
superior in having been graced with special status by the creator (a patriarch,
possibly circumcised), while contradictorily experiencing more suffering,
deprivation, death and horror than any other humans in the history of history –
go figure - and this is all final-solution proof that Israel is the absolutely
necessary “self proclaimed” state of the Jewish people, the way ISIS is the
“self proclaimed” state of the Islamic people. But in Israel’s case, because
they are mostly European despite the Semitic stuff about Middle Eastern origins
and because of the incredible suffering and near extermination they have
suffered for thousands of years – leading one to wonder how come there are any
of them left? – have much more right to self proclaim than a gang of actual
Semites like ISIS. Or something.

This second group is a far greater
threat to humanity and its future than the sometime ravings of the first, and
given the reality of the second group’s power over too many governments,
especially the USA’s, it may be that it will cause the first group to grow in
numbers. That is, until and unless all people, regardless of their belief
systems of specialness and, most ignorantly of racial difference, overcome
irrational reliance on ancient myth and modern tragedies often provoked by
adherence to principles inherited from those myths, and grow into a human
family that acknowledges cultural and ethnic difference but denies ridiculous
notions of racial difference and stratified superiorities according to
supernatural belief systems.

Experience, contradiction
and denial of objectively defined history, and legend-myth-fables in which many
peoples have actually been totally obliterated, and not simply in alleged
attempts at national, ethnic or racist destruction are common. The assault on
european jews by the nazis and their allies during the second world war has
become the most known case and while it was a dreadful experience involving
ethnic cleansing, great suffering and murders, it has also become the only such
story acknowledged internationally, often called the worst experience ever suffered
by any people and just as often exaggerated to exclude the sufferings of many
people treated so much worse they don’t even exist anymore and have no one
teaching about their unique subjection to the inhumanity of conquerors who not
only saw them as less than human but wiped them out, totally.

The entire
population in what Europeans “discovered” as a new world back in the 15th
century is an obvious case in point, but the American part of that experience
is clear enough a far more serious assault on a people, and rarely even touched
upon as such outside of minority group consideration with little if any impact
on the majority of American’s consciousness.

The
indigenous people of the continent that became North America have not been
totally wiped out but suffered millions of deaths, complete loss of their
homelands, and came very close to being destroyed as a culture and a people
–which is supposed to define the overused-to-the-point-of having-no-meaning
word, genocide - with present status as “indians” only coming to their
descendants, many of whom are still confined to concentration camps we called
reservations - making it sound as though they were going to dinner - where they
live at the lowest material standards of any americans. This outrageous treatment
which began centuries ago and continues to the present microsecond is given
little if any attention by the major consciousness controllers and mind
managers of american society, while the european treatment of jews is never far
from attention in media, popular culture, education, politics and just about
any aspect of american life.

Further,
there are nearly as many Jews in Europe, after the dreadful persecution that
has come to be known as the holocaust, as there are Indians here. And while
there was a great decline in the European Jewish population after the war,
there was an increase in the number of Jews in other places to which they had
escaped, and to Israel both before and after 1948. Indians had no place to
which they could escape.

The establishment
of that jewish state, believed by some to be a haven and the only safe place
for jews on planet earth despite the fact that millions of jews live elsewhere
and do quite well thank you, has led to more extremism in the two groups
mentioned at the top. Worst of all, the murderous disregard for the Palestinian
people, for centuries dwellers in and on the land that came to be colonized as
israel and since its establishment treated as a sub strata of the race, has
fading numbers still buying into the mythology that they were never really
there, while a growing global community becomes more outraged at the treatment
of Palestinians as creatures of a lower order by an invading colonial power
supposedly chosen by god to rule the area.

Those who see
a jewish menace everywhere are driven to say “see, we told you” while those who
see the eternal threat brought about by whatever it is they possess and
everyone else wants to kill them for are equally driven in the “see, we were
right” direction. It is not over simplification to point out that only the
second group is armed with nuclear weapons and convinced it is surrounded by
anti-Semites intent on time honored genocide-annihilation-extermination and the
rest.

For the
world, it’s like confronting one nut case with a gun and another mob of maniacs
with nukes. They both need to be dealt with but you don’t need a degree in
weapons politics or economic religion to clearly see which one is the greater
immediate threat to the greatest number of people.

As for clearly european descended people labeling
themselves Semites, that makes as much sense as all of us calling ourselves
Africans, or the pc accepted "people of color", since we are all
members of the same race, regardless of the fact that some "people of no
color" think themselves part of a master race or self chosen upper echelon
people as they have been led to believe by their cultural rulers. After all, we
originated in Africa some two hundred thousand years ago, and that was millennia
before any of us evolved into sub-groups that later became called things like Semites.

Whatever national, ethnic, identitarian or other minority
labels we are given or forced to wear, we need to get past the marketing
process that labels us and become a majority that learns to cooperate and share
rather than dominate and own. It isn’t only Israel and anti, philo or pseudo
Semites that need to learn this lesson. Americans who finance, arm and conduct
the wars raging in the Middle East, all related in some warped way to allegedly
defending a minority while actually trying to destroy a majority, play a bigger
role. When we stop, it will stop, and the chance for not only a truly
democratic middle east but a better world will greatly increase.

Friday, October 16, 2015

The Democratic Party debate (October 13) and its aftermath crystallized the political crisis the United States currently faces. Hillary Clinton was quickly declared the "winner," not because she made a convincing case for her politics, but because "no one laid a glove on her." Actually, that is not really true, as Bernie Sanders delivered a convincing rebuttal to Clinton's lame attempt to justify capitalism on the basis that it is the source of many successful small businesses. Aside from the fact that Clinton's stance is the standard GOP defense of capitalism, Sanders correctly pointed out that it doesn't matter how many small businesses there are if income gains accrue nearly exclusively to a microscopic minority of investors at the top, as has been the case for some time now in the USA.

In any event, it's certainly true that an honest picture of Clinton's ugly politics and the appropriate damage to her public image it should do, did not emerge from this debate. But given that the mass media function to conceal major state crimes, some of which Clinton has participated in, this was only to be expected. U.S. voters remain in the dark about everything they most need to know, even AFTER the debate allegedly designed to enlighten them. This is good reason to dismiss criticisms of the American electorate as "apathetic," since watching U.S. political debates is akin to taking a sleeping pill before studying for the final exam.

One gigantic opportunity was completely missed. Clinton's gushing reference to European leaders' fears of an imminent "mass genocide" (as opposed to those genocides in which only a handful of people are killed) in Libya during her tenure as Secretary of State presented a perfect opportunity to not only "lay a glove on her," but in fact to deliver a knockout punch. Unfortunately, the media "personalities" conducting the debate (Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash, et al) were solely concerned with the soap opera of Hillary's e-mails, which Bernie Sanders dismissed with appropriate irritation as a distracting charade. Meanwhile Sanders, Clinton's only significant rival for the Democratic nomination at the moment, failed to follow up with a critique of Clinton's role in deposing and murdering a popular head of state (Moammar Qaddafi) while plunging Libya into murderous chaos at the hands of Washington's de facto al Qaeda allies, chaos from which it has still not emerged four years later, nor will it anytime soon. Hillary called this "smart power at its best."

Let us here note that the charge of "genocide" has become a joke in U.S. political parlance, invoked only to justify Washington's constant military interventions abroad. In the Libya case, it refers to Qaddafi's insistence that rioters in Benghazi lay down their arms, a demand that any head of state would make in similar circumstances.

Sanders' silence on the all-important matter of Libya may be owing to his own support for going to war to stop fake genocide, namely in Yugoslavia in 1999, when the "socialist" Sanders repeatedly and enthusiastically supported Washington's 78-day bombing campaign that ultimately deposed a democratically elected president (Slobodan Milosevic) and reduced socialist Yugoslavia to a Third World colony of NATO. This alone completely discredits Sanders' alleged socialist credentials, a fact lost on the billionaire-blowhard Donald Trump, who immediately dismissed Sanders as a "socialist-communist" and a "maniac" (the three labels are considered synonymous by all "serious" commentators and politicians).

All of which leaves the way wide open for a Trump presidency. Aside from Ben Carson, all of Trump's GOP rivals are mired in single digits in the polls, nearly crippled by conventional political rhetoric and analyses that promise to further entrench a status quo the electorate desperately wants to see changed. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Clinton's claim to be an "outsider" because she's a woman is not likely to convince more than a handful of political eunuchs of the Pussy Riot variety, while Sanders has shot himself in the foot on foreign policy and adopted a handicapping socialist label to describe his economic policy, when in fact he is simply a social democrat with modest (but nevertheless helpful) ambitions to revive the New Deal. (In the U.S.A. the New Deal remains popular whereas socialism is heresy.)

Will Trump prove to be the "American Berlusconi"? If he succeeds in convincing an electoral majority that government programs like Social Security and Medicare are akin to "giving everything away" to the undeserving (i.e., to the American people who pay for them), as he recently claimed, while his own plans to hand out budget-busting tax breaks like Halloween candy are somehow not, he may well be.

Bernie calls for a political revolution but leaves out the economics,
which are inseparable from the politics. His “socialism” is social democratic
capitalism and as such a giant step beyond his compatriots. He moves the debate
closer to populist economics but the movement needs to put the problem smack
dab on the spot. It is capitalist economics, not just corporations, the rich,
Wall Street, Israel or minority rule of the political economic process, none of
which are anything new but have all become more blatant in the return to pre-great
depression free market fundamentalism which has even Clinton calling for
control of capitalism which gets out of control from time to time, she says.

Always, we say, for those on the loss side of the ledger.

And they are growing in number as the profits increase for a
shrinking group at the top.